


Clangs

by Vehemently



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is it: Gen AU. A homecoming. A horror.<br/>Tagline:  It was just a stupid accident. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clangs

_November 2, 2005  
Lincoln, Nebraska_

Sam walked out of his lab section and into a stiff wind, maple leaves and trash snapping around his ankles. The air wasn't cold, not that real cold of early winter, just a crisp hint of the season to come. It was good running weather. He would blow right through Saturday's 10K in weather like this. It was perfect Halloween weather; too bad it had been in the eighties two days ago.

He was securing the flap of his messenger bag as he paced through the parking lot towards his car, thinking about his social psych midterm and the pretty girl who sat in front of him, and whether she would be at Jim's party on Saturday night, and really, whether it was weird to pick up a girl in your social psych class, wasn't that like splinting the knee of your anatomy classmate? -- which was why he came around from the back of the Impala and was startled to see someone leaning against the hood as if he belonged there.

"Hey," Sam challenged. The guy wore an oversized drab jacket that looked like it had been rolled through a few puddles. Definitely wasn't Crazy Bob, who panhandled in front of the Super Mart ten blocks from here: no gloves, no doggy companion, and he was missing the quilted sleeping bag Bob wore like a cape everywhere he went. At Sam's voice, the figure twisted around, old clothes and unkempt hair, and although Sam knew that face, at first he couldn't place it.

That face should be clean-shaven, attached to a body that stood freakishly straight, ears sticking out under brush-cut hair. That face should be against a Sears-blue background, forehead a little obscured by the brim of that stupid white hat that made him look like a police officer, mouth solemn in his official Marine portrait. It was the totally wrong face for a crazy homeless guy in Lincoln, because Dean was not a crazy homeless guy and he lived in California. Had lived in California.

"Hey yourself," said Dean, and took a drag on the cigarette between his fingers, casual as if he'd disappeared only a day ago. He hadn't been a smoker, the last time Sam had seen him. "How come you park so damn far away from your building?"

"I, I," Sam stammered, mouth open. He came up close for a good look: sunburned, circles under his eyes. His fingernails were bitten to the quick, and some of his cuticles were scabbed. He didn't smell so good, either. Sam had been dreaming about him, the last couple of weeks, half nightmare and half wish, himself but not himself. In his dreams, Dean never looked like this. Sam wasn't sure whether to touch him or not. "I like the walk. What are you doing here? Where have you been all these months? Jesus Christ, Dean, what happened to you?"

Dean put out a hand and stood up. "One at a time, tiger," he said, dropping his cigarette to the pavement. He ground it out with a boot heel, methodical, slow enough Sam just stood there gaping and let him gather his thoughts. But all Dean said was, "You on your way someplace?"

A stiff breeze stepped between them, lifting the edges of Dean's hair. He shrugged his jacket more closely around him, though Sam wasn't feeling the cold at all. "I guess, yeah, home." Sam blurted it without thinking, and then realized that meant he was inviting Dean to go there. It was too late to suggest they go to a diner, or something. Sam stood aside and Dean glanced left and right, illicit.

He pulled open the passenger's side door without arguing about whether Dad had given Sam the car, or only loaned it to him. In the past two years, Sam had replaced the radio with a CD player, and upgraded the lap belts with modern shoulder seat belts. Dean didn't remark on the changes. Sam looked him over again while he turned the key: Dean just sat there with his hands in the pockets of his coat, staring out the windshield, eyes in constant motion. He didn't look like a Marine at all. He looked like a stranger.

Lincoln was a nice enough town, a college town. Sam drove home the slow way, past the hardware store he'd worked in part time, and the grocery store with the cross-dressing manager (he -- she -- had a thing for elegance, pearls every day, and made you feel like your cold cuts and toothpaste were a grand luxury), and the Korean restaurant that had to be some kind of Mafia front, because nobody ever actually ate there. At every stoplight and landmark, Sam opened his mouth to narrate their journey: as if he could peg Dean down into Sam's own reality, as if he would fit here. Dean would not fit here. The blank of his time missing was stifling, brittle. He watched every pedestrian and approaching car as if it might be attacking him. It was a long, quiet drive.

As he pulled into the parking lot Sam finally said, "I'm surprised you didn't go to Lawrence. Dad was -- he worries about you a lot."

"Yeah," Dean grunted over his shoulder, and stepped out of the car.

He paced along the sidewalk up to the front door, and stood there waiting for Sam to come unlock it. Sam held the keys in his hand tightly: he had the power, here. It was his apartment, and Dean was a guest. Sam felt the awkwardness like a too-heavy sweater. "Come in," he said, and slowly Dean did as he was told.

He'd never been in this town, in this building, in this hallway. When they'd last seen each other, it had been in Lawrence, at Dad's house, two years ago. Sam led him up the stairs and into the apartment and wondered at that: whether that had been unconsciously intentional on his part, making sure Dean was excluded from his college life. He'd lived here since his sophomore year, summers as well as during the school year. He couldn't remember whether he'd ever told Dean the address.

The apartment itself was tiny and ramshackle, a place Sam had assembled himself. Everything did double-duty: the futon was folded as a couch during the day; his desk was also the kitchen table; he kept the tomato plant alive (miraculously still yielding tomatoes, this late in the fall) in a big stew pot he'd salvaged from someone else's moving trash. He was proud of himself, that it was tidy and an efficient use of space and looked like a home instead of like a dorm room. His big ambition was art on the walls, or anyway frames for arty posters, instead of thumbtacking them to the wallboard. Dean stood on the worn carpet clearly not giving a shit about art on walls.

"So, uh, I guess you'll -- you hungry, or you want to clean up first?" Sam felt unaccountably naked, as if Dean would disapprove of the place, as if he had the right to judge. There was nothing of Dean or Dad or Lawrence here.

"Clean up, I guess." Dean hunched his shoulders and let Sam lead him to the bathroom. It was just big enough to fit one adult standing up, full of loose floor tiles and amateurishly caulked seams. Sam leaned in and flicked on the light when it became clear Dean hadn't thought to do so. They faced each other across the threshold.

"I'll fix you a sandwich while you're in there," Sam said. "You want coffee or just a Coke or something?"

"Don't make a new pot just for me," Dean said, and began pulling off his jacket. Sam realized suddenly that Dean hadn't brought any luggage with him at all: the clothes on his back were all he had. While he watched, Dean pulled a handgun out of his jeans and set it on top of the toilet tank, next to his half-empty pack of cigarettes.

It was really big, shiny, clean the way nothing else on Dean seemed to be. The noise it made on the porcelain was innocuous, but all Sam could do was stare at the barrel of it, the way it pointed toward the wall for safety. It looked heavy and purposeful and a little bit terrifying. Dean wouldn't be carrying it if it weren't loaded.

"Okay," Sam said, slowly. "Uh, the handle for hot is a little loose, lately. I just haven't got around to fixing it yet. Be careful." He left Dean putting down a folded manila envelope overtop the weapon, and slipped back out into the main room.

His pants would be too big, but they could be belted and rolled up. Sam hunted in the kitchen cabinets for a sweater that was small enough Dean wouldn't be swimming in it. He pulled out a bunch of layers -- even underwear, Sam decided -- and walked into the bathroom while Dean was in the shower.

Dean startled a little as the door opened, the Marine tattoos on his shoulders flashing as he spun around. Sam pretended not to have noticed, and deposited the new clothes and pulled down a fresh towel from the top shelf. He gathered up the pile of dirty clothes, which might have walked out of the room under their own power they were so bad. It would probably be better to just burn them, but Sam decided against that. He gathered up a handful of quarters and headed down to the basement and turned out the pockets for washing: some change and crumpled bills, a couple of filthy keys, a smooth white stone, a Zippo -- no wallet. Sam put the load on hot, and added extra soap. He trudged back up the stairs, feeling the grit of never-washed clothing on his fingertips. He let himself back into the apartment and did a quick reconnoitre of the fridge to make sure there weren't any stray beers he'd forgotten about. But the fridge was thankfully empty of alcohol. He put on a new pot of coffee.

It wasn't too long a wait for Dean to pull himself together and present himself for chow. He'd gone ahead and shaved, though Sam had forgotten to set out a razor for him. He wore every stitch Sam had laid out, down to the ridiculous brown sweater (a gift from Dad? Anyway, it was years old) that was small on Sam but baggy on Dean. He'd put on the clean socks, and left his filthy boots behind on the bathroom tiles. He sat at the kitchen table and tucked into the ham and cheese Sam had made as if he hadn't eaten in days.

Which was a possibility. Sam looked over his longish hair combed back in wet ridges, the way the clothes fit, and couldn't decide whether Dean was really thinner or whether it was just an illusion. He didn't know how to ask, so he said nothing. He busied himself in the ritual of coffee, only wondering after he'd done it whether Dean still took cream or if that was the sort of thing that changed while you were away. He set the cup next to Dean's elbow.

"So," said Dean, around a mouthful of sandwich. "Senior year, huh?" He didn't look up from eating.

"I'm majoring in psychology," Sam babbled, "developmental stuff. Adolescents in transition, that kind of thing. I'm working on an honors thesis about -- about risk-factors and perceived social success in the ninth grade. I had to pass the institutional review board and everything." He trailed off, awkward.

"That's cool," Dean said flatly. He inhaled the coffee. "Seeing anybody?"

"Not -- not right now. I've been kind of busy. I've," and Sam wondered whether it was okay to talk about your future like this, in front of somebody who didn't look like he had one. "I've been applying to doctoral programs. There's this fellowship at Indiana Bloomington I'm going for. It's pretty prestigious, research and stuff, but it's still close enough I can go home and check on Dad."

The way Dean whipped his head around, eyes narrow, made Sam back up a step. "He's not helpless, you know."

"I know." Sam held his hands up, placating.

Dean made a noise and stood to open the fridge himself. Sam wasn't sure he liked this version of Dean much more than the shy stranger. He spread mayonnaise on the bread and folded the slices of ham just so. That was a Marine thing, probably; after he'd gotten back from his first year in the Marines he'd folded his underwear.

"So. There are a bunch of people who were worried about you. Am I allowed to call them and tell them you're all right?"

"Call who?" Dean asked, setting the plate back on the table. He ate as if he didn't care who Sam might name.

"Well, I mean, Dad," Sam said. "And the Marine Corps. Your C.O. A couple of other guys in your unit Dad talked to. The police department in San Diego."

"You got the cops involved?" Petulant, like he was when he thought the rules shouldn't apply to him.

"Of course they did, Dean. Dad filed a missing persons report. He was on the phone every day, nagging them about whether there were any John Does matching your description in the morgue." There was something unnecessarily punitive in the way Sam phrased that. He could feel himself losing his temper. "So you walked away on purpose? Of your own free will, I mean?"

"I had some stuff I had to take care of," Dean said, offhand as if he could end the conversation so simply. He'd been doing it for years, of course.

Sam scratched at a stain on the countertop with his thumbnail. He'd scrubbed it before, and it would never come clean, but he dug at it anyway. "You go to prison for desertion during wartime, Dean. I looked it up. How you could do that to Dad --" Realizing the unsteady ground he was on, Sam shut up and crossed his arms.

Dean didn't react, to the part Sam said or the part he didn't. He finished the sandwich and batted the crumbs around the plate and Sam stood over him fuming.

"Your C.O. explained a few things. A few things you hadn't told Dad about."

All the air vanished from the room as Sam's heart pounded. Dean didn't stand up and clock him, or yell at him, or do anything. He just stood up. His face wasn't as naked as Sam had ever seen it, but it was open and plain, not a face of denial. There were more freckles on Dean's nose, more lines around his mouth. The smoking had taken a toll. He looked like he could stand a good night's sleep in an actual bed. He was twenty-six, and looked a lot older. Something flickered over his forehead, a shadow or a twitch, and Sam wondered whether the paranoid stranger from the car was going to reappear and hustle this honesty away.

"He was so scared," Sam said, and the despair overcame him. "Why didn't you call?"

At last Dean turned away. He stood to put his dishes in the sink. "Wasn't safe."

That wasn't the response Sam had been expecting. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and thought back over five and a half months. Twenty-some weeks, and nobody had heard a word. Dean could have ridden a motorcycle around the world in that time. He could have crossed somebody unpleasant and gone into hiding. He could have joined a cult. He could have joined the circus, for all Sam knew. Dean just stood there at the sink, just looking at the dishes. Sam shrank away from him and cast about for some way to distract himself. The jar of quarters was right there, on top the fridge.

"I'll, uh, I'll go put the stuff in the dryer. You still hungry? Want anything?"

"I need a smoke. Front porch okay?"

"Fire escape. Just climb out that window. Shut it behind you, I don't want bees inside."

There was the remote possibility Dean would just up and disappear while out for his cigarette. Sam pondered it while he set the dryer, how unsafe you had to feel before you would walk away in your brother's socks and no shoes. If he hadn't felt safe on a Marine base, with all the outlandish weaponry they keep -- Sam didn't know what he'd done with that big shiny handgun he'd left in the bathroom. Sam paused, standing in the basement, and listened for other people. There were probably twenty students in the building, most of them grad students. He couldn't hear anyone else. The dryer was a calming, steady noise, like music from down the street that you knew but couldn't recognize, like the sound of Dad's voice from two rooms away.

Sam let himself into the apartment and detoured past the bathroom door while he picked up Dean's muddy boots. The bathroom was otherwise empty. Except for the used towel, neatly hung on the shower rod, there was no sign that an unexpected person had been in there today. He carried Dean's boots to the window to scrub them and to see if Dean was there.

He was, of course. Sitting on the steel slats of the fire escape, halfway through his cigarette, just looking past the row of trees at the street. There was no sign of where he'd hidden the weapon -- the clothes Sam had lent him were too baggy for that. Sam wasn't really sure how you carried a gun like that, in your pocket or just nestled in your buttcrack or what. Dean would know, though. Sam wasn't even sure it was on him. Down on the sidewalk, students walked by, girls in turned-down U-Neb sweatpants and sandals as if it hadn't turned cold. Dean stared at them and they strolled onward and didn't even glance up.

"They're not California girls," Sam said, and used his fingers to dig crusts of dirt out of the boot treads.

"They're not wearing underwear," Dean replied. Sam squinted, but his vision wasn't good enough to assess panty line at that distance. The girls waved their arms at each other, talking, pushing their loose hair back onto their shoulders and not noticing when it fell forward again. They were probably freshman, eighteen or nineteen; he might have met one of them at a party, once. They came to the corner and turned onto a side street, and were gone.

Sam watched Dean take a drag, and said, "You know what Dad said? Right before you disappeared." Dean didn't seem curious, just sitting there with the cigarette between his knuckles, wrist on the railing. "He said you needed to get married. He was annoyed he couldn't think of a girlfriend you'd ever kept for more than a month or two. He thought a good woman would just settle you down and straighten you out."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Dean chuckled, and Sam gave in and laughed a little too. The air was fine and smelled like late rain and except for the cigarette it was like when they were kids, out on the back porch, telling stupid jokes while they fixed a bike chain or oiled their baseball gloves. Then, boot in hand, Sam firmed up again.

"Your C.O. said he tried to get you counseling, more than once. And that you talked your way out of it."

The cigarette was down on the fire escape before Dean remembered he didn't have any shoes on. Sam obliged, and stomped out the butt with the boot on his hand. The breeze picked up and Dean shivered again.

"Listen, I don't know what your plan is." Sam examined his work on the boots carefully. It was shockingly hard to say. "But this isn't Dad's house, it's mine. And I don't -- I don't know if it's a good idea for you to stay the night. I don't have a lot of space, and, and, I don't know if I can be around you if you're still in bad shape. I can't take that."

Dean put his head in his hands. He stayed that way for a long while.

"That's not -- I don't mean to blame you, man. I just can't. I have to take care of myself. If you're, if you want to get better, then I can help with that. I would be totally cool with that." The tears were close. Sam bit his lip and held them off. "But it can't be like it was two years ago, and definitely not if it's gotten worse."

A shaky breath, something that sounded like emotion. But when Dean raised his head, he was dry-eyed. "Your place, your rules. Come on, let's go back inside. I'm tired of the neighbors staring at me."

There were no neighbors to stare. Sam stood and turned all the way around on the fire escape. There weren't even any cars on the street below them.

***

Dean came back in and paced the apartment, all four or five strides of it. He was smooth, agile, not touching things he didn't want to touch. He didn't look like a man on a bender any more; he looked like a man on a mission. It was a little creepy.

"Were you thinking about turning yourself in?" Sam asked, while Dean cocked his head at the stove. "Cause, I mean, the Corps has resources, they can help you..." Sam trailed off, realizing Dean hadn't said a thing about trying to get better. He hadn't committed to anything.

"Haven't decided."

"Decide before you go to Lawrence," Sam pleaded. "Don't make Dad decide for you."

"He still the same?" Dean reached out and touched the electric burner, traced its coil.

"He's got twenty years' practice." Sam shrugged. "Sometimes better, sometimes worse. When you disappeared, he was pretty stressed out." Sam didn't tell about driving down there, helping Dad keep it together and navigate the arcana of police and Marine bureaucracy. His program chair had been pretty understanding, and he'd made up all his incompletes over the summer. Sam had been down every other weekend since then, just to check. Maybe that would change, if Dean went to Lawrence. "Hey, you really need to call him and tell him you're here. Or I could do it," he added hastily, as Dean blanched.

After a few seconds Dean turned away. The kitchen wasn't big enough for pacing and he headed out into the main room. "Just tell him I'm okay."

Sam had his phone in his hand and was hitting the speed-dial before it occurred to him to wonder why this was his job, why he'd volunteered. The phone rang and he put it to his ear stupidly, at a loss what to say. Dean's paces resounded dully from the other room.

"Ace Garage, what can I do for you?" It was a bright, crisp voice in his ear, and Sam startled a little.

"Oh, hi Mike. This is Sam. Is my dad around?" If Dad wasn't around at three in the afternoon -- that would be a problem. He hadn't been that bad for a while.

"Yeah, he's pulling apart a Saab looking for a knock nobody but the owner can hear." Mike laughed, and Sam laughed with him. "Hold on a sec."

Clanking and some distant, tinny music. Lawrence was three hours or a galaxy away, depending on how you counted. And then there was the voice, that familiar deep voice, right in Sam's ear. "Hey sport. What's up?"

He wasn't a superhero who would swoop in to save them. He couldn't even save himself. He was just Dad, as he'd always been. His shoulders had curved forward over the years to support his gut, and his hair was all gray. His hands were gentle, his voice gentler, and his aging loneliness never far from the surface. It resounded in his low tones even now, in the good part of the day, when he was relaxed and looking forward to his first drink, when he was funny and cheerful. "Hey, Dad."

Dad waited and Sam listened to him breathe. Dean wasn't pacing any more; Sam didn't know where he was.

"Uh, I have some news, Dad. I heard from Dean today. He called. He said he's doing okay and that he didn't want you to worry."

"Yeah?" Dad's voice climbed, almost cracking. "Where'd he call from? He leave a number?"

The lie was easy, just a quarter-turn from true. "He was shy about talking to you. He said he'd broken up with some girl, went on a long bender. I think he's going to try and straighten himself out before he comes to see you."

"What did he sound like? Did he talk long? Where is he?"

Dean stood half-in, half-out of the kitchen doorway, unnaturally still. Sam could only see one of his eyes, and half of a thundrous frown. "Uh, I guess he sounded okay, I mean, he didn't sound messed up. He didn't ask me for money. He wasn't in jail or anything. He was at a pay phone, so it wasn't a long conversation."

"Well, did you tell him to call back collect?"

"Yeah, Dad." Sam steeled himself against Dad's hopeful hunger for details. "I told him." It struck Sam suddenly: he was an old man, had been an old man for a while, maybe since Dean enlisted or maybe before. He was just Dad, plodding, unimaginative, slow like he was always afraid he'd break things with his big body. He'd had no idea what to do with a teenager like Dean, and all the yelling in the world hadn't made a dent. Sam had been outmaneuvering him since the age of twelve.

It didn't make any sense, that Dean should be so afraid of facing him. Dean could kill Dad with his bare hands a hundred times over, and could probably kill him quicker with a cruel word. Nobody ever said no to Dean. Nobody except Sam.

Dad's voice rumbled in his ear, like a comforting background noise, and Sam looked up. Dean wasn't in the kitchen doorway any more. He'd disappeared. Stunned, Sam lunged toward the windows, wondering how he'd escaped so silently. But he hadn't escaped; he was just in the next room, arms hard across his chest, frowning at the ceiling.

***

"Dad thinks you'll call him later," Sam said, after he hung up the phone. Dean didn't acknowledge he'd said anything. "I think you should."

He watched Dean stand still, that weird ready stillness he had, where the only thing that let you know he was alive was his breathing and the fact his eyes moved. His eyes were darting everywhere, one wall to the next, too fast to be actually looking at anything. Sam put his hand up on the door lintel, just a few inches above his own head, and realized suddenly that if you weren't used to such a small apartment, it might freak you out.

"Could stand to stretch my legs," said Dean, under Sam's gaze. He shrugged as he said it, casual.

"Let's take a walk, then," Sam agreed. "We can come up with a plan."

A little too enthusiastic, Dean bolted for the door and knocked over a pile of Sam's books as he went. He didn't even notice as they splayed on the floor; he was already in the hallway. Sam nudged them back into some kind of order with his feet, and grabbed an extra jacket for Dean on his way out the door.

Dean led the way, a purposeful stride. He was being a Marine now, putting on that confident face. Sam was nonplussed to realize that he knew Sam's own neighborhood well enough that it wasn't just aimless wandering. There was only one park in this neighborhood -- actually it was a cemetary, but people walked their dogs in it -- and Dean was headed right for it.

He didn't slow till they were under the trees, the late sun slanting through dying leaves. It was brisk, but not uncomfortably so. Dean stepped off the path and into the grass and at last Sam asked, "So did you have a plan in mind?"

Dean shook his head. "I go back to Pendleton, they'll arrest me, right?"

"Yeah, probably." There wasn't a way to bring up the topic smoothly. "Or you could turn yourself in to a VA hospital. To be evaluated."

That got a chuckle. "Only a headcase would walk away from the Marines."

"Seriously, Dean." Sam didn't quite dare reach out and stop him, to make the point as forcefully as he wanted. "They have groups of other guys who were in the war, they have substance abuse treatment pro--"

Dean cut him off. "I quit drinking a long time ago." He said it offhand, the way he would correct Sam if Sam had confused Army jargon with Marine jargon. It didn't sound like a promise or a shaky assertion or a conversion experience. It sounded like something settled and over with. Sam stopped in his tracks, so suddenly that Dean took three more steps under the eaves of a maple tree and had to turn around.

They stared at each other, flame-bright leaves dancing between them. Dean hadn't ever been that great a liar; he charmed his way out of trouble, most of the time. If he was lying, he'd gained a lot of practice since the last time Sam had seen him.

"How long is 'a long time ago'?"

"Almost a year. Back in Iraq." Dean made a face and half-turned away, so the setting sun left him in shadow.

"And you've been completely sober ever since?" As soon as he said it Sam realized how accusatory that sounded. But he watched his brother think it over, mouth pursed, as if he were doing sums in his head.

"Pretty sure," he said at last.

Sam didn't point out to him how weird an answer that was, how much it sounded like a lie. "So... what made you decide to do that? Cause, last time I saw you, you didn't think it was a problem."

"That was two years ago, dude. Shit happened." Dean turned fully around and started walking again, and Sam followed after him. They strolled down a gentle hill, kicking leaves, side by side and each with his hands in his pockets. After a little while Dean said, "There was some pretty serious shit I did, that I didn't remember doing. The other guys would tell me about it after, like it was the most hardcore shit they'd ever seen. Like, shit I would never do if I was myself."

Sam exhaled slowly. There was no point in challenging him on that.

"So I quit." Dean hesitated, but whatever else he'd been about to say, he didn't.

They walked a little while farther, and Sam realized Dean knew where he was going. This was not a random stroll through the trees; Dean was leading him somewhere.

"Well, the VA people can help you stay that way. And I bet there's some kind of group, you know, meet on Thursdays, drink coffee, talk about the war kind of group. Maybe they could get you on medication, Ativan or Xanax or something. You don't have to do this all by yourself in a vacuum, you know? There's a lot of other people who go through what you're going through."

Dean's mouth twisted up, and as if against his own will a dull laugh escaped. He turned his head so Sam wouldn't see him and put on a straight face.

"Seriously, Dean." Sam put out a hand, not so close it would touch Dean but close enough Dean couldn't miss it.

"I know you're serious. I know they're serious." He stopped, and showed Sam that open, honest face again. The sun was at the horizon, Dean's skin painted an orange glow. He was in dreadful earnest. "I have something I want to show you."

He took Sam's elbow, the first time they'd touched all day. His grip was delicate, just a couple of fingers and firm pressure and no hint that he'd leave a bruise if Sam resisted. Sam didn't resist. He let himself be led the rest of the way down the low hill, and his neck became colder as the sun disappeared. Up above his head, the bowl of the sky was a wash of red to yellow to a deepening blue-purple. He stumbled, uncertain in the changing light.

"Here," said Dean, and led him into a small copse of birch trees, thin like whips. The white bark seemed to glow, and Sam looked around him: birches on all sides, a rough circle, the grass long between them. Dean tugged on his elbow and settled to the ground, sitting cross-legged. Baffled, Sam sat with him.

Dean let him go and they breathed side by side in the increasing dark. Dean said nothing. Sam listened carefully for the evening birds and the traffic from out on the boulevard. It was a relaxing place to be, just the grass and the birch leaves and the quiet of the dead all around. But Dean hadn't ever been the sort for nature meditation before.

"You like this place?" Dean asked, intense.

"Yeah, I guess. Kind of pretty."

"Listen, I want you to promise me something and it's going to sound stupid." Dean patted down his chest, as if feeling for the pack of cigarettes he'd left behind on Sam's kitchen counter. Stymied, he crossed his arms and stared at the grass. "If you're ever -- if you ever feel like you're losing it, or like there's somebody else in your head with you, I want you to come here and sit in the circle of these trees. Will you do that?"

Sam was pretty familiar with the concept of projecting your own fears onto somebody else. "This is a safe place to be?"

"Yeah, I think, yeah. I've done everything I can to make it a safe place. Will you promise?"

There wasn't any trash around, and the grass outside the circle was neatly trimmed. Maintenance crews did that kind of thing, though. Sam tried to scrutinize the area in the dark and couldn't see what was so special about this place to Dean. "I --"

Dean's eyes were huge in his head, glassy, tiny glints of far-off light reflecting in their pupils. Dean, who'd picked fights with football players, who had cut open a cherry bomb to find out what was inside, who jumped out of planes for a living: scared. Sam had never thought of him as a fearful person before.

"I promise. If you'll promise the same thing. If you ever have to walk away again, that you'll come here."

"This isn't about me," Dean insisted.

Sam commanded him: "Swear, and I swear I will too." He held out his pinky finger, like they were little kids and could hook each other to faithfulness.

The breath Dean let out was long and slow. "Yeah, okay," he mumbled, and wrapped his pinky finger around his brother's.

***

It was well into full dark when they stumbled out of the graveyard and back to commercial civilization. Sam watched Dean as they crossed the street: his hyperalert assessment, the way he positioned his body at angles from each person coming the other way. The streetlights and neon signs were disorienting after that weird intimate dimness. Sam wasn't sure what to do next.

"Hey, you hungry again? I'm thinking about dinner." There was a sports bar down the block, and after that pizza and Chinese. Sam was pretty sure the Chinese place, at least, didn't have a liquor license. "I'm buying," he added, after he remembered the paltry bills he'd turned out of Dean's pockets.

Dean shrugged and let himself be led past the temptations and into the dingy Chinese place. It smelled like hot grease and was harshly lit, like an interrogation room on TV or like a bus station.

They sat in the front window, waiting for their order. Dean played with the menu, traced characters with a finger. He was content to be silent.

Sam wasn't really watching him. The news was on, on a TV with the sound turned down perched atop the fridge full of Coke cans. It was the ordinary evening news, the national news, and over the talking head's shoulder was a sere picture, gray and tan and bright sky above. The desert photo took over the screen and after a moment it blew up, dust everywhere. Little figures in gray dashed around frantically, yanking at each other, heads bobbing in every direction. It was just the war, just the war going badly, and at least this time Dean wasn't in it. Sam looked away.

But it was too late. "You ever seen an explosion at night?" Dean asked. He was still looking at the menu. "It's kind of awesome. Your eyes are used to the dark so it seems even brighter than it is. Kind of strikes you blind."

Sam listened. For the first time, he wondered why Dean had joined the Marines. He'd been so eager to go, so much less tense after the paperwork was signed, as if he was depending on them to straighten him out. He'd stuck the Corps logo stickers all over his locker at school, and then once he was in he'd tattooed those stupid logos onto his own body. He'd joined in peacetime, gone and done disaster relief and cooled his heels for six months at a time on Okinawa and sent the most outrageous postcards to Dad. He'd joined in peacetime and then peacetime had ended and now here he was.

"Was it something in Iraq that second time that set you off? I mean, you'd only been back at Pendleton three weeks --"

"Check out the little detective," Dean sneered. He had no idea the detective work they'd all done. Fully-grown adults just don't disappear without a trace, not men, not large, healthy, capable men with fighting skills. Not unless their name was Dean Winchester.

"Yeah," Sam bristled. "That's what people do, when they're worried. They search through your stuff to try and see if anything's missing, they find your passport and your driver's license and your bank cards in a cigar box, like wherever you were going you didn't think you'd need them."

Chastened, Dean turned his head away. Sam stared at him, pitiless, and though Dean couldn't see it clearly he was feeling it. "What the hell, I saw a lot of things over there." He fixed Sam with a bitter frown, pugnacious as if it were a competition. "People died. Arms and legs came off. What disgusting story can I tell you to make you happy?"

Sam didn't want any story at all, but he was stuck with it now. He waited Dean out.

"Last fall, I saw my unit use white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon. You know what that is?"

"No," said Sam. "Does it glow?"

"It's an incendiary device. Burns till it runs out of O2. You're supposed to use it as a signal flare or a screen."

Sam listened, cold. Dean wasn't looking at anything in particular, just his hands and the menu and the white melamine table. He wasn't nervous or shocky or guilty; he looked like he was just telling a story.

"It's so bright it's like daylight in the night scopes. You throw water on the fire and it doesn't do shit, just keeps on burning. They were using it on the bad guys like a regular shell."

"They were using it on people?" Sam asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw their order was ready. He put out a hand to make the clerk wait and concentrated on his brother.

"You know, I blow shit up for a living and I wouldn't use white phosphorus on people. Not even on the bad guys." He shook his head, frowning. "Who does that? You burn people alive that way." Sam reached out for one of his hands and Dean avoided the move by simply standing up. "Food's ready."

Sam stood with him. He fumbled out his wallet and they performed the ritual of takeout. Dean lifted the steaming, greasy bag and they let themselves back out into the night air.

With a last glance back at the evening news, Dean said, "We were crawling with embeds. I don't know why it never got reported."

****

They ate on the front stoop, Dean pickily correcting how Sam held his chopsticks. A few students came in and out, not many, nobody Sam knew. He watched Dean eye them suspiciously. With a scowl on his face, he wasn't nearly the ladies' man he liked to think he was.

"So," said Sam, as they were crinkling the plastic on their fortune cookies, "I think the nearest VA psych center is in Omaha. I can drive you there tonight, if you want." Dean's hands stilled on the plastic and his forehead took over creasing.

"Not tonight." He hesitated, and steeled himself. "You don't want me here, I can sleep in the car or something. Just -- not till tomorrow."

Sam paused. "Something special about tomorrow?"

Dean balled up the cookie wrapper, held it still and silent in his hand. "No, no. I just, I have a lot to tell you, man. You don't need an hour's drive on top of that. Two hours, both ways. Look, can we go inside?"

"You seemed a little claustrophobic inside, last time. I figured you'd be calmer out in public."

"This is private business, man. I can't go telling your neighbors all this shit."

There was a long pause while Sam thought about the two of them, cramped into his tiny apartment, and whether there were any alternatives. There really -- weren't. "Okay, I guess," he said at last.

As if to reassure him, Dean said, "Your house, your rules."

Sam detoured them to the basement to pick up Dean's dry clothes, and then they were back in his little apartment. Sam slung himself down on the futon while Dean fussed with folding his jeans. He stuffed things back into the pockets just as Sam had turned them out: the Zippo, the paltry cash. He fingered the two loose keys for a long moment.

"This is for you," he said, handing the smaller one to Sam. "It's a safe deposit box at your bank. I opened it a couple days ago."

Sam hid the key in his fist. "You've been following me."

Dean blinked, surprised, although he'd been dropping hints all afternoon. "I was just -- keeping an eye on you. And, you've been busy. I didn't want to interrupt."

The lab schedule was pretty heavy, but Sam spent hours by himself in the library, in his apartment, running on the track on campus. With a pang, Sam realized he was hearing code for _I was afraid of your seeing me._

"So. What's in the deposit box?"

Dean's smile was brittle. "Four thousand dollars in cash. It's for you." He saw the look on Sam's face and said immediately, "It's all legit. I didn't rob a bank or anything. I sold the truck." He put no inflection in it, as if selling your means of transport and stuffing wads of cash into a box were something everybody did, as casually as you might trace a crack in the wall. Dean put out a finger, feeling the rough edges, and as Sam watched him do it he realized that it really was a crack, not just a bad paint job but the wall in the early stages of structural failure. He'd never noticed it before.

"Why sell your truck, Dean? Won't you need it? What about your savings and stuff back in California?"

His back to the room, Dean followed the crack upward. Sam could see now that the join at the ceiling was a little bowed, most likely warped from moisture. No wonder the ceiling paint peeled in that corner. Dean said, without turning, "Dad's got power of attorney. That doesn't expire, right? If you need it, that's yours too."

Santa Claus Dean was not. He was always broke, always bumming a couple of bucks from Dad. Sam asked, uneasy, "Why won't you need that money?"

"I might." Dean chuckled, then grew serious again as he faced Sam. "But I think you'll need it more."

"Dude, I have scholarships. I have Dad. Summers, I've got jobs and internships and stuff." Sam tried to guess what was going on, Dean standing there calm with the crack climbing the wall behind him. People give away all their stuff when they're about to go join a cult in India, or when they're about to -- Scrambling, Sam asked, "What if the Corps discharges you? What if you need more rehab, and the VA won't pay for it --

Dean rolled his eyes. "I told you already --"

Sam's heart thumped hard. He didn't know how to ask why Dean wasn't thinking beyond the next couple of days. "But there's like years of therapy and social situations and figuring out how to handle stress and --"

"Why do you think I took up smoking?" Dean joked. "And you're the first person I've had a conversation with in weeks."

His face was a smirky rictus, his voice completely level. But the world his words created was so bleak in Sam's imagination he was struck dumb. He saw Dean in his mind's eye, trying to hitchhike next to a wheat field, out in the west of the state where you could see forever and it was wheat all the way, tall yellow straw, mesmerizing symmetrical rows of it, endless, empty under an empty gray sky. Thumb out, and not a fellow human breath in miles. Dean stood under the peeling paint in Sam's apartment armed and dangerous and beatifically ready to donate all his worldly goods to the younger brother he didn't even like. The only thing Sam could do was lay all his cards on the table. "Then at least give me the gun. Please."

Dean stiffened and pulled it out from the back of his jeans. "Wait, you think I --" He didn't finish that sentence. He looked at the gun instead of at Sam's face. Along its silvered muzzle, pointed at the floor, Sam thought he could see his own reflection. There was a long silence while Dean stood there mute and Sam worked himself up to stating the obvious.

"If you killed yourself, you'd be killing Dad too, and you'd screw me up for life." The crude bludgeon of the words themselves helped Sam firm his voice into anger. Anything but tears, at this moment. Anything but fear. "So don't you dare."

Dean held the gun casually, in his right hand. It looked like it fit there, which of course it did. He'd spent eight years learning how to shoot people, and stab people, and do whatever else it was Marines did to fuck people up. He didn't talk about it much, but he hadn't won the medals he had just for his pretty face. He wasn't a killer, but he'd done some killing.

With his other hand on the top of the weapon, Dean twisted his wrist, and in three or four efficient movements he'd removed the clip and popped out the last bullet. He twiddled it between his fingers and snapped it into the clip, and held out both clip and gun to Sam.

"You're right, you might need this too." Sam didn't take the offered hardware. Dean paused, and sat next to Sam on the futon. "I'm not gonna do anything to myself, man. I swear." He pushed the clip back into the gun with the ease of long practice and set the gun on a corner of the desk, and as he leaned back it was the easiest thing in the world for Sam to throw an arm around him. Dean tolerated Sam's shaky breathing and clinginess, and after a minute he gave a shrug. Sam pulled away and gave him his space.

"I'm sorry," sniffled Sam. "I just thought --"

"I swear, Sammy."

It was terrifying, not just the thought that he might die, but the overwhelming surge of dependence Sam felt at the thought. Sam didn't know who he was, without Dean as an opposite to model himself against. Sam felt like he was eight years old all over again. He hated feeling so small.

"Why are you such an asshole?" he protested, dull. But all Dean did was chuckle.

"How else are you gonna know you're the good kid of the family?" This was so close to what Sam had been thinking that he flinched away and stood up.

"Look, I am not responsible for your problems --"

"This psychology major crap is poisoning your brain, dude. What is with you and whipping out the expertise right and left?"

The anger was overwhelming. Sam hissed, "If you see a guy drowning, even if you can't stand the guy, do you just let him drown? Well hell, maybe you do. But I can't."

Dean blinked, his face slowly going blank. He set his feet on the floor and sat up straight, his hands unmoving on the futon. There was a little fold of fabric in-between each knuckle, where he'd clenched his fists in the slipcover and then let go.

"Okay. Okay, I did this wrong." Dean said, "I didn't come back here to get rescued. I don't need to be rescued. I came back here to tell you something, and you're not gonna like it anyway, and I already managed to piss you off." He stood up and paced to the door, and back, glancing in all the corners of the room. It was one thing to see him paranoid and withdrawn in public, but when he pulled it off in a one-room apartment --

"I'm listening," Sam allowed.

"This is about the fire," said Dean. He didn't say which fire, as if Sam should know, as if everyone should know, as if there had only been one fire in the history of the world.

"The white phosphorus?" Sam knew there had been a confession in that speech somewhere.

But Dean screwed up his face in impatience. "No. The fire that killed Mom."

This was -- unexpected. Sam realized that Dean did need a shrink -- and was using his own brother as a stand-in in the meantime. Which was better than nothing, but, Sam definitely wasn't qualified, and really wasn't sure he was ready to hear about it. It had all been so long ago, so over and done with and swept under the rug, Sam didn't know how to handle the idea of pulling it out and examining it now.

Reaching into his jeans again, Dean pulled out the big manila envelope Sam had seen before. He unfolded it carefully, smoothing out the creases, and shoved it at Sam. "The police report's in there. The fire investigator's report too. They're all public records." With slow clumsiness Sam pulled the papers out of the envelope. They were heavily folded down the middle, and would not lie flat. The edges of each page were gummy and gray, photocopy smudges and greasy fingerprints. Sam glanced at them, just enough to see the way some of the forms had been fed into a typewriter unevenly, so that the letters drifted subtly from left to right as if seasick. He really wasn't interested in reading.

"What do you want me to see?"

Dean paced away, and back again. "I tracked down the fire investigator: he's retired now. He'd never seen anything like it. He said that fire couldn't have been hotter if the walls had been painted with thermite. That's why they couldn't tell."

This amount of research, this kind of dogged long-distance work, was not something he'd ever expected Dean to do. "Couldn't tell what?"

"Read the goddamned report, Sam. The body was so burned they couldn't tell whether she was still breathing when the fire started. That's the only reason they didn't arrest Dad for her murder."

Murder. Dean was so earnest, eyebrows folded together. The interpretation of this one event meant everything to him. Murder, though. Sam didn't know how to approach the word. He couldn't even imagine it, a stubborn blank in the middle of his mental picture of disaster. He tried to put rage into his father's face, or the cruel calculation necessary to plan something like that, and failed. Dad just wasn't like that.

Something must have showed on Sam's face. "What are they gonna think? Unexplained fire, likely presence of accelerants, the little kid makes it out but the grown woman doesn't? What would you think?"

"I --" Sam controlled himself. He could see suddenly how Dean would come to believe it: Dad's unwillingness to talk about it; Dean's problems with his temper; finding the worst-case scenario to explain everything. It was the kind of simplistic cause-and-effect ideation that worked in the movies: a timeline, a dramatic revelation and a good cry, and you got better. "How long have you had this stuff?"

"I've been putting it all together for the past two years --"

"Dean, you know Dad. He's just -- he doesn't have the capacity to kill somebody." He didn't have the capacity to discipline an out-of-control teenager; he couldn't possibly kill his own wife.

"Fuck no," Dean exploded. "Of course he didn't do it."

Relief flooded over Sam, and then a hollow backwash of irritation and confusion. The whole family was trapped in the past, all of them except Sam himself. He wasn't willing to rescue Dean if it meant letting himself be pulled down and trapped too. He shuffled through the paper in his hands and saw again where Dean's hands had touched those pages, had worried at them and dog-eared them. It came out snappish, moreso than he'd meant it to: "So what is this about? If you're not accusing him of murder."

Dean flopped into the desk chair. "You don't want to hear it."

"I'm sorry. I'm trying to listen. You just kind of threw me for a loop with that one." Sam could see Dean's hands, trembling as he dug his fingertips into his scalp. "Look, I -- I need a Coke. You have a smoke, I'll go down to the machine in the lobby, and, and, I'll listen."

"You'll listen," Dean aped, his voice shaky. "Okay."

"We can talk all night, if you need that. I want you to get better." Sam stood by the door and watched Dean stare glassily into the middle distance.

"Yeah," said Dean. "By the end of the night I guess I'll know."

***

With a cold plastic Coke bottle resting against his forehead, Sam felt a little less like panicking. He could handle the idea of Dean being screwed up by the war, or even screwed up by growing up with Dad. The fire, though -- the fire was something Sam knew nothing about. It terrified him, that everyone in his life was so damaged by that one event that he didn't even remember. The idea that he might be damaged too, in some way he didn't even know, was unacceptable.

He sighed and headed back up the stairs. It took some juggling to transfer the two Coke bottles around so he could open the door, so when he stepped into the apartment Dean wasn't startled. Dean was watching him already, a wary look on his face, Sam's phone to his ear. He was deathly pale. "Yeah, Dad," he said into the phone.

Dad. Sam looked at the clock. It was after seven, which meant Dad was two or three deep at least. Not so far deep he wouldn't remember what he was saying, but deep enough to get loose. Sam had no idea what to think of this.

"Of course I know that." Dean turned his eyes toward the middle distance, as if seeing the three hours' drive between here and Lawrence. Sam set down one Coke on the desk, within arm's reach, and went into the kitchen to open his own, so the noise of it wouldn't be audible. He came back out in time to see Dean put his free hand to his head, as if shading his eyes from sun or scrutiny. His voice when he spoke was rough.

"I know, Dad. I'm sorry." He sat there and took whatever oppressive enthusiasm Dad was heaping on him. Sam sat down on the futon beside him and offered the Coke, but Dean shook his head. "Yeah. Yeah, Sam's got a plan. Yeah, look, I gotta go, Dad. Okay."

He closed the phone and put it carefully on the desk.

"How's he doing?" Sam asked, offhand so that it was as okay to answer as not.

Dean shook himself. His eyes were a little red, and he made them redder by pressing his thumbs against his eyelids. "Happy as a pig in shit."

The only person Sam knew who could out-personality Dad in his good phase was Dean. He was expansive, charming, everybody's best friend. The Dean in Sam's apartment, this twitchy, serious character, probably wouldn't be fooled. Sam was pretty sure Dean wouldn't be fooled. "Did he say he'd pull a few strings, get you reinstated?"

"Something like that. Like he's got any strings to pull."

Sam made an agreeing noise and drank his Coke, gestured for Dean to do the same. It was unclear from the way he talked whether Dean had called Dad, or had picked up Dad's call. Neither scenario seemed all that likely.

"I could hear myself in the background," Dean added. "'You don't like it, go join the Marines.' God, I was annoying. He was watching the tape from my highschool graduation." Sam remembered that day. A skinnier, more animated Dean flapping his idiotic maroon robes and beaming, just two weeks away from the Corps and eager for their arcane initiation. Sam sighed.

Dean wiped his eyes. "Why does he have to be so goddamned _nice_?"

"So you've never talked to him? About the fire?"

A harsh laugh. "What'm I gonna say? Hey Dad, remember when we all almost died? Good times, huh?" At last Dean reached out for his own Coke, opened it, drank. They sat side by side for a little while, just the noise of carbonated bubbles between them. Sam felt suddenly close to his brother, as he hadn't in years. As if they could say anything to each other, and it wouldn't be a disaster. If there was a way to coax silence into speech using only the power of wishing, Sam used it. As if in response, Dean spoke: "The rest of the papers there are my medical records. I called up the office and asked for all of them, from my first shots after I was born."

Sam nudged the pile of papers with a finger. Under the official-looking typed records, a stapled sheaf with crazy handwriting on the front page. Doctor Thorn's handwriting, the doctor they'd been seeing all their lives.

"I fell off an obstacle course when I was 20, got all tangled up in a rope line. I felt this click in my elbow, right? Like pitchers always say they feel when they're about to go in for Tommy John surgery. So they take me in and do x-rays, and when the x-rays come out the doctor asks me why I never told him I broke my arm before."

Sam straightened where he sat. "You've never broken your arm."

"He could see it on the x-rays, where it'd broken and healed. He said it happened when I was real young, before I grew. So I asked them for all my records, and I open it up to 1984 and there it is, broken radius, age five. It said I climbed out a second story window and fell."

Dean had been a death-defying kid, and hell on wheels as a teenager, but Sam was pretty sure he would have heard about a broken bone. If Dean himself remembered it. He'd already copped to blackouts in adulthood, drinking or dissociation Sam wasn't sure, but if he'd had them in childhood too, that was -- bad. As gently as he knew how, Sam asked, "Do you have a lot of holes in your memory?"

"I guess, I don't know." Dean waved that away irritably. "That's not the point. I'm so little, most of the explanation comes from Dad. How I must have had a nightmare about the fire and tried to climb out the window. So he tells the whole story of the fire all over again, and this is four months later, right?"

Sam was only half-listening, as he flipped through the stapled sheaf of papers. Dr. Thorn's handwriting was impossible to read most of the time, surrounded with nurses' translations and annotations. He found what he was looking for: a note at the bottom of the page about the arm. _Mutism, withdrawn aspect. Referral to child therapist 3/22/84._ Sam looked up, stunned, but Dean was barrelling onward.

"The stories don't match, Sam. They don't match. Between November '83 and March '84 Dad changed his story."

"Did Dad ever take you to a therapist? The note here says he was supposed to."

Dean burst into incredulous laughter. "Dad?" He turned his laugh into a dull noise in his throat and Sam realized with misery how unlikely it was that Dad would follow up on something like that.

"Yeah, okay," Sam allowed.

Up on his feet, pacing, Dean was serious again. "So, the later version, he just picked us both up, got us out. But the earlier one: Dad saw something, that night. During the fire. Something -- unnatural."

Sam didn't know what _unnatural_ was supposed to mean. He sat very still, dreading what Dean might say.

"I went through the police file and the fire-investigator's report. It's all there, every word he said. They wrote it out pretty baldly: they thought he was lying or they thought he was nuts. The investigator guy remembered Dad right off." Dean stopped and turned to Sam, earnest. "Mike Guenther told me some stuff too. About how paranoid Dad was, after. He was convinced he saw something. And then after a while, after Mike threatened to report him, he said what everybody wanted to hear. He rolled over, man. He gave in. And," Dean slowed, shaky, "it's like he pretended it never happened."

He was sweating, jumpy. Sam didn't look at him, but at his reflection in the windows. Slowly, hands out, Sam crossed the room and put his hands on the sash and tugged till one of the windows came open. Just a handspan, just to get some cool air into the room. "So," Sam analyzed, his face an inch from the glass. All he could see was the room behind him, nothing of the world outside. "The part that bugs you isn't what happened, but the fact Dad wasn't able to handle it."

"For Christ's sake, Sam, don't you give a shit about this at all? This is like the most important thing that ever happened to you. Pay attention." Dean's angry gestures made Sam back up a step. Dean took his place by the window, intense as if seeing something there Sam couldn't see. "Dad said she was already dead. He said she was already dead and stuck on the ceiling in your room. Like a fridge magnet or something. He said she was bleeding from a cut on her belly. It's all in the original police report," he added, as if expecting Sam's skepticism. "Read the papers on the table. It's all there."

Of all the meanings of _unnatural_ , that wasn't what Sam had been expecting. Nerveless, he paged through the police report and saw in stark typewritten letters the evidence of Dad's delusions.

It made no sense. Sam left the papers where they lay and returned to the windows. He opened all of them, all the way up screens or no. Dean put his elbow on a frame and leaned his head there, tired. His borrowed brown sweater flapped in the evening breeze.

Riddled with pauses, as if confessing something shameful, Dean went on. "It was something evil. It was something really evil, that hurt Mom. And Dad saw it and knew it and then just pretended he hadn't." He was close to tears. He screwed his eyes shut. "He screwed us over, man. He gave up."

It made no sense. They stood together in the open window and the fire escape glinted in the moonlight. Out beyond, Sam could see houses, lights in windows, college students too silly to understand the concept of blinds, walking around their apartments, ignorant of his intrusive view. A car went by, down on the street, its headlights showing the hard pavement and the weeds on the edge of the curb and the tumbling candy wrappers in the gutter. Sam took a deep breath.

"Look. There are a lot of things that happen when people deal with traumatic events. You have a crappy memory. Dad sedates himself every night."

Dean made an impatient motion with his shoulders, and lifted his head as if to argue.

"No, wait. This -- I study some of this. Dad lost his wife, and almost lost us too. The idea that it was just a stupid accident makes no sense, you know? It's got to be more important than that. So, in his head, he made it into something important. He made it into murder, or whatever satanic thing he hinted at, because a concrete threat makes sense in a way that stupid bad luck doesn't. And then," he added, hand raised, as Dean turned right around with anger on his face, "and then, when it came down to it, when his belief got so far that it started being a threat, he was able to give it up. I mean, so he ended up a drunk instead, but he was able to recognize that his belief was going to get us put into foster care, and admit that it was false. How is that giving up?"

And just saying it was the first time it had occurred to Sam that Dad had been somebody else before the fire, before anything Sam himself could remember, that he might have been happy once. It was weird and frightening, like some shapeless monster shambling around in his head, knocking things over and rearranging the furniture. Now Sam was the one close to tears, and he couldn't really say why.

But Dean was away from the window, agitated, prowling through the tiny kitchen and back out again. He must have realized how his behavior was coming off, because he put his back to the wall next to the bathroom and stilled himself. The jitters in his torso, the fast breathing, gradually slowed. He kept his eyes closed.

Sam watched him and belatedly remembered the gun on the desk. It had been sitting there for half an hour while they'd argued. With Dean in the state he was in -- Sam picked it up, ginger with that heavy weight in his hand, and went to the kitchen and stuffed it in the freezer. He pointed the muzzle of it at the back wall, the way Dean had done every time he'd put it down. His hand was still on the freezer door handle when he heard a mumble from the other room.

It was so quiet he couldn't understand what Dean was saying. He stepped out of the kitchen and heard, more clearly this time, "It wasn't false." A thump, as Dean banged his head on the wall, and said it again, louder. "It wasn't false." He banged his head a second time. He was opening his mouth to repeat himself yet again when Sam bounded across the room to stop him. He pressed a hand over Dean's mouth and pulled him away from the wall, not roughly, but as quickly and securely as he knew how.

"Don't say that, man. Don't say that."

Dean didn't resist. He let Sam yank at him and and just stared, just those big sorrowful eyes above Sam's bony fingers, full of conviction. No twitch across his forehead gave him the lie, no quirk of an eyebrow turned it into a joke. They stood there like that, Sam looming over him with all the power and Dean standing still and giving it to him, hands loose at his sides. The wind blew into the apartment so chilly that Sam shivered, and with that involuntary motion he pulled away and gave Dean his back. Sam slumped to the futon and put his head in his hands.

***

So, maybe Dean was psychotic. It explained more than a few things, like maybe he'd fled Camp Pendleton in a fugue state, unaware even of his own name. Sam realized he was living out his nightmares of the past few weeks: Dean himself and not himself at the same time, that old familiar face terrifyingly new. Sam was in way, _way_ over his head. He sat still on that futon for a long time, trying to think.

He heard the futon frame creak and felt body warmth beside him. Dean didn't touch him, just sat there, quiet. His breathing was fast but even.

"It wasn't a false belief of Dad's. It was something real, some evil thing, and it was in that room." He cleared his throat. "I didn't want to believe it either, but the stuff I've learned, I can't just, it's not --" He lapsed, unable to continue.

The gun was in the freezer. The windows were open, but there was a fire escape to stop anyone's fall. Sam's phone and keys were right there on the desk. If he needed to get out, he could get out. His heart thumped at him, hard and jarring in his ribcage, just like Dean's head against the wall.

"There's a whole other world out there, that people don't see. But once you know how to look, it's all around. There's people you can talk to." Sam didn't raise his head and he didn't react. Dean shifted, restless. "It freaked me out at first too, but it also explained a lot."

A buzzing sound, somewhere above Sam's head, like white noise. It waxed and waned, a tiny throttling engine, never loud enough to drown out the litany of Dean's insane arcana.

"I didn't mean to spring it on you like that." A hand came and settled on Sam's knee, as if that could possibly be comforting. "I should have been here days ago. I just, I knew you'd take it badly."

Sam scrubbed his face with both hands. "How am I supposed to take it? 'Hey, sorry I bugged out, I came back because I'm being persecuted by the devil.'"

"Goddamnit." Dean was up and pacing again. Sam winced at the joke's leaden failure. " _You_ are, Sammy. It was in your room. It was after _you_." Dean's gravity was so convincing, so persuasive, if only he weren't talking nonsense. He glanced around the room, fumbled for the calendar on the wall. It was a cheap giveaway from the Italian place on the other side of campus, the whole year on one big sheet. "Look, look at today. It's the second. Do you think I picked today out of a hat?"

"I think," and Sam struggled to keep his tone neutral, "that you picked today because you figured out I didn't have any labs after two in the afternoon."

"It's the anniversary, you idiot. It's the anniversary and it's coming back for you, tonight."

That buzzing noise again. Sam focussed on it, held that noise in his head. It was something mundane, so mundane he couldn't place it. It was a comforting summer noise.

"And that evil thing, I don't even have a name for it, I just know it figured me out months ago. It's been trying to stop me getting to you, so I won't save you." Those penetrating bright eyes, that forward chin like an arrow. "I start putting it all together and suddenly I'm seeing crazy things, guys I know with their eyes turned all black, grinning at me like some kind of sick fuck. The stuff they would say, man. And then a second later the guy'd be normal again, just a little dizzy or something, no idea what just happened. Like it wasn't him."

As he finished his sentence Dean darted forward, so quick and close to Sam that he flinched. But all Dean did was clap his hands once, not far from Sam's ear, like a crack of close thunder. The buzzing was gone. He stood back and opened his palms, and showed Sam the smear of dead yellowjacket obscuring his lifeline. He frowned at the base of his thumb, and picked out the stinger.

"And then it wasn't me. I'm not denying I was there, I was. But it wasn't me." He pulled off a paper towel and wiped off his hands. "I was totally helpless inside my body. I was standing there and the fire was like looking at the sun and I couldn't even shut my eyes against it. Somebody knocked me down or else I'd have been the perfect target, just standing there and the air like daylight, and I couldn't move. I don't even know how long it went on, what else got done in my name. But I know it wasn't me. It was something else, something evil, taking control away from me."

He was not agitated now. He stood over Sam, brows furrowed, nodding a little to himself as if confirming a basic truth. Unconsciously he worried at the sting-mark on his thumb.

"That's how I knew it was real. I would _never_ use that stuff on people. Not even on the bad guys."

There was no point driving all the way to the psych center in Omaha. It was going to have to be the University clinic, or St. Elizabeth's emergency room, which Sam was pretty sure didn't have a psychiatry department at all. It would be far better if he could convince Dean to go voluntarily.

"So. So, what would happen if I decided I didn't believe you?"

Asking blandly made Dean slump a little. He pushed the calendar away on the desk and flopped into the desk chair. "I guess I'd leave, break in after you're asleep, and save you anyway. That's not what you want to hear," he added, bitter.

"No," Sam admitted. "It's not."

Dean reached out both hands and grabbed Sam's wrists, hard, unyielding. He had power in his hands, and Sam felt trapped. "You have to let me do this."

Sam raised his arms, slowly, and flexed against Dean's grip. Dean didn't let go. Between them, Dean's arms turned over and on the white flesh inside his forearms were new tattoos, ones he'd obviously gotten since his disappearance. On his left wrist, just below the standing tendons, a pentacle, like pagans wear, and on the right, some other circular symbol Sam didn't recognize. They were in plain blue ink, stark, weirdly lovely, only half-hidden by Dean's borrowed sleeves. "Let me go," Sam said.

But Dean only held on tighter. He was hunched forward, his face in shadow at that angle, long hair in his eyes. The intensity of him was as hot as the temperature of his fingers. "Maybe this time," he whispered, so close Sam could feel the breath on his cheek, "maybe this time it'll be me on the ceiling."

"Dean." Sam swallowed, more terrified for him than of him. The lock on Sam's wrists was severe, a little painful, and his hands throbbed against the cutoff in their blood supply; but it probably wouldn't leave any bruises. He flexed his wrists again, calculating the right tone of quaver with which to say: "You're hurting me."

Instantly on hearing those words Dean let go, stood up and crossed the room and faced away, only a few inches from the wall. He looked like a little kid who was being punished.

"I'm sorry," he hoarsed. "I never wanted to do that again."

The easy thing to do would be to sweep it under the rug. It probably wouldn't have left any bruises. Sam was the bigger of the two of them. They were both adults. He used the ammunition Dean had given him: "That's what you said last time."

Dean gave one rough sob and Sam knew he'd hit his mark. Cautious, he advanced further.

"You've had a lot of shit thrown at you. Mom dying, how that screwed up Dad, the war, whatever. And I'm sorry it hurt you so bad." They were both shaky now, and it shocked Sam how afraid he was, afraid and exalted at the same time. "But that doesn't give you the right to hurt me."

With a low piteous cry Dean spun around. "You think I don't know that I screwed up? You have to let me help you."

"Dean. Dean. Listen to what you're saying." Sam stood and put both hands on Dean's shoulders like a coach or a teammate, shaking him gently. "You joined the Marines to, I don't know, to get a do-over on Dad's life for him --"

Dean broke from Sam's touch and fled. The apartment had never seemed so small. "This isn't about me --" Sam chased him with his words.

"-- And all the Marines did to you was screw you up worse, make you do things you couldn't handle, do you think that white phosphorus story is going to fool anybody? You've done a lot of awful things, but that doesn't make you an awful person. And I'm sorry nobody else ever told you that, but it's really that simple. You hit me once two years ago and it scared you, and whatever you did in Iraq scared you worse, and here you are scared out of your head trying to rescue me to prove you're not a villain. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that."

They stood on opposite sides of the room and stared at each other, Dean horrified and Sam a little pugnacious, ashamed and proud at the same time. It was with ugly gratification that he touched his lip, evoking in one gesture the mental image of Dad's kitchen, Sam sprawled on the linoleum and Dean standing over him blank, shoulders heaving, with red spatter on his knuckles. He watched Dean's face crumple and was afraid he'd gone too far.

"I want to help you. I do," Sam insisted. "But I can't believe in what you're saying."

"Sam, please." Dean took a step, another. He crossed the room and reached for Sam's hands again and this time he was all gentle pleading. "Please let me help you. You're in danger. If I can't do anything else right I can at least save you from that."

"I'm not the one who needs saving, Dean. You are." The tears on Dean's face were hard to take. The way he stumbled, Sam couldn't help but sit them both down again on the futon. Dean hunched down so far he looked sick, or injured.

"Please," he mumbled, his voice muffled. "It's coming tonight. I know it is. You have to let me save you."

Sam put an arm over his brother's shoulder. "Only if you let me save you first." Inspiration struck, and Sam held out his pinkie. "You swore, right? We both swore. We go down to the birch tree circle, and stay there till you feel safe. All night, if we have to. And in the morning, you'll let me take you to the emergency room and have you evaluated."

That pinkie finger hung there in the air for a long time. Dean didn't raise his head to see it, didn't even seem to notice Sam's faltering expectation. After several silent minutes, and as Sam's hand began to tremble, Dean wiped his face with his forearm. His new tattoo flashed, just peeking over the edge of his sleeve. "I know what I saw."

Sam said nothing. Dean stood up and paced two steps toward the wall, stopped, and finally turned.

"Yeah, okay." He gulped and came forward to hook his pinkie into Sam's own. Then with both hands he grabbed Sam's wrist and pulled him to a stand and enveloped him in hard, trembling arms. "We both live through tonight," Dean told him, "and I'll do whatever circus tricks you want."

***

They lay side by side in the grass, Sam on his back and Dean on his side, watching Sam. The blanket they'd brought was wet with dew, and they shivered under it. Any bees that had survived this late into the fall, any that hadn't found a warm house to hide in, had to have died in the night. The sky was dark iron-gray, still at least an hour before dawn, and Dean had talked himself hoarse a long time ago.

"I dreamed about you," Sam said, more to convince himself he really was awake and lying in a graveyard with his insane brother, that this itself wasn't a dream, than for conversation. "While you were missing. For weeks. I dreamed that I came home to Lawrence and you were already there. But you weren't you, I mean, it was your face but somehow it wasn't really you."

Dean stirred, but said nothing for a long time. Sam was opening his mouth to go on when he heard the low rasp: "Did I have black eyes?"

But Sam pushed onward instead of trying to remember. "This isn't you, you know that, right?" It felt vulnerable to say, as if he were pleading. "You'll get better, and you'll be able to look back on this as just one bad night."

"You're wrong," Dean murmured. "This is the best I've ever been."

Sam blinked at sudden tears. Above his head, the darkish sky and the pale gray fingers of the birch saplings, their knots like black-edged knuckles, a mass of hands not killing but protecting some tiny vulnerable creature underneath: a lightning bug, a dragonfly, a tiny lizard perched in a little kid's palm. Dean shifted and rolled so he was on his back, wedged up close under Sam's shoulder. It was a little warmer, anyway.

"I don't know about other kinds of trees," said Dean into the cold air, starting back on his litany of advice. "But birch definitely works against bad stuff. Even if you can't wrap your head around the symbols and the charms, the basics still matter. Iron for power, bronze for clear vision, salt for purity -- I already said that, didn't I?"

He had already said that, six or eight times. He'd said the part about holy water and sacred ground and Solomon something and the mystical value of silver. But that didn't stop him.

"Maybe you should find out about your dreams, too. If he can come at people during the day, no reason he couldn't invade your dreams. There's gotta be a way to guard against that."

There wasn't anything Sam could say. He let the tears roll and just listened to the cadence of that voice, the certainty of it, the way Dean was trying to be reassuring and just making himself sound crazier with every word. They watched the sky together, as it paled in the predawn. The spade-shaped leaves over their heads became distinguishable one from the next, and then slowly their gray shapes took on color: a riot of yellow, with the last flushes of green among the lower branches.

When Sam heard the first sparrows he shook himself and wiped his face. "We still have a deal?" Dean sat up, grass in his hair, and with his back to Sam he nodded.

"I'm ready. I can take it."

He didn't sound relieved or confused or whatever Sam had been expecting. He just sounded tired. Sam sat up. "I just want you to be well, Dean. There's medications you can take. There'll be people you can talk to."

"You're still alive, man." Dean busied himself retying his boots. "You're still you."

Sam stretched, sore, and then clutched his knees to his chest for one last moment of warmth. "I don't know what the Marines will say. They might retire you on disability, or something."

"Whatever happens, you're prepared now." Dean stood, and put out a hand to help Sam stand. "Use this place if you have to, man. That's what it's here for." He held onto Sam's hand to make sure the point got across. Sam pulled gently and got his hand back without a struggle. "Use those phone numbers I wrote down. That dude Caleb, he helped me a lot. He explained all about --"

"Don't," Sam begged. "Please."

The sun broke suddenly over the eastern edge of the park, startling warm pink on their faces. Sam was in charge now. Watching Dean's reactions carefully, he stepped out from the circle of birches and onto the even mown turf that sloped downward gently toward the boulevard. They would be walking into the sun; Sam liked that imagery. Dean crossed out of the circle without a twitch or a protest, and followed where Sam led him.

The lack of sleep and the stress of it all came down on Sam suddenly, and his head pounded dully, back to front. "Trust your instincts," Dean said, low, as they came to the pavement. There were no cars at this hour, just a wide expanse of painted road and the apartment building on the other side. "I'll get out as soon as I can. I got your back on this one, I swear."

"Okay," Sam said, dully. He threw an arm over Dean's shoulders, maybe to steer Dean in the right direction or maybe to keep himself from keeling over. They turned right instead of crossing the street, and walked toward the emergency room. Huddling together, Dean's arm across his back, Sam stumbled in the morning light and could not have said which of them was leading the way.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by minim_calibre and cofax7.


End file.
